The Problem of Sexual Hygiene

teaching, and the credit of the sexual hygienist is gone. Life is an art, and love, which lies at the heart of life, is an art; they are not science; they cannot be converted into clear-cut formulæ and taught as the multiplication table is taught. Example here counts for more than precept, and practice teaches more than either, provided it is carried on in the light of precept and example. The rash and unqualified statements concerning the immense benefits of continence, or the awful results of self-abuse, etc., frequently found in books for young people will occur to every one. Stated with wise moderation they would have been helpful. Pushed to harsh extravagance they are not only useless to aid the young in their practical difficulties, but become mischievous by the injury they inflict on over-sensitive consciences, fearful of falling short of high-strung ideals. This consideration brings us, indeed, to what is perhaps the chief danger in the introduction of any teaching of sexual hygiene: the fact that our teachers are themselves untaught. Sexual hygiene in the full sense—in so far as it concerns individual action and not the regulative or legislative action of communities—is the art of imparting such knowledge as is needed at successive stages by the child, the youth and maiden, the young man and woman, in order to enable them to deal rightly, and so far as possible without injury either to themselves or to others, with all those sexual events to which every one is naturally liable. To fulfil his functions adequately the master in the art of teaching sexual hygiene must answer to three requirements: (1) he must have a sufficing knowledge of the facts of sexual psychology, sexual physiology, and sexual pathology, knowledge which, in many important respects, hardly existed at all until recently, and is only now beginning to become generally accessible; (2) he must have a wise and broad moral outlook, with a sane idealism which refrains from demanding impossibilities, and resolutely thrusts aside not only the vulgar platitudes of worldliness, but the equally mischievous platitudes of an outworn and insincere asceticism, for the wise sexual hygienist knows, with Pascal, that "he who tries to be an angel becomes a beast,"